Urinals

The then owner of the Minnesota North Stars, Norm Green, gave the good people of Minnesota ice in the urinals and they did not show proper appreciation, so he left:

Minnesota native Ralph Strangis, the Stars' play-by-play announcer who he started his career in the Twin Cities and moved with the team to Dallas, thinks Green hasn't always been judged fairly. "I was right in the middle of it," Strangis said. "And I think, to some degree, Norman got sort of a bad rap." Strangis talked about the improvements Green made at the arena. "(He) put a lot of money into the Met Center," said Strangis. "Changed all the seats out, put a new scoreboard in, put pictures of the franchise all around the concourses, put ice in the urinals...that was one of his favorite things. And, lo and behold, even after going to a Stanley Cup final, he couldn't figure out a way to make it go."

http://www.kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=498582

 

Was in New Orleans one time, and the wife needed to use the unisex handicapped bathroom. As we're walking up to it, some nasty homeless woman beats us to it by about three steps. Five minutes later, she comes out with a sheepish grin on her face. My wife went in and immediately came back out retching. It was the nastiest, foulest, most disgusting act of bathroom demolition I've ever been a witness to. Whatever she found in the dumpster that morning smelled 10 times as bad coming out.
So, yes, women be nasty in the bathroom.

 

Upset of the year. I read a five-page thread about piss and came away craving Potato Olés.

 

R Kelly has his own system of urinals, but most of us don't have that option.

 

When I tended bar, I paid $20 to get out of cleaning the women's bathroom when it was my Saturday to do it.

 

I know a lot of people who have serious dislike for using public restrooms. I am not one of those people, at least not with the right public restrooms.

I do a lot of advanced scouting in places I spend a lot of time. I had my high school and college campuses mapped out, knew everything about every restroom. My offices are the same. I know what time is best to go up to the eighth floor and when the cleaning crew will have finished the restroom on the Life side of the third floor, where there's never anyone after 6 p.m. This stuff is more important to me than it rationally should be. But I derive a measure of control and comfort from it. It's what makes sense in a world that chews us up and spits us out.

There are certain things to look for in a public restroom, things that cannot be negotiated or things that serve more as nice highlights of a trip. I'll break it down area by area:

STALLS

The first rule of a restroom stall is the seat must be white. If you have to sit on one of those black toilet seats, you better make fucking sure it's been cleaned recently, then still take about five paper towels, wet them, use even a little soap and clean the seat again yourself. Who the fuck decided a black toilet seat is the way to go? Black is way too close to brown.

Also, check for toilet paper. This might seem obvious, but I have on more than one occasion had to assist someone who forgot. Decent places have the double roll contraption. They're really not as hard to use as stupid people make them out to be.

Lighting is a luxury. It gives you the ability to read and to check better for cleanliness, but I really advocate for assuming filth even if the seat looks fine.

URINALS

We've discussed many things about these in this thread. But we haven't discussed the urinal flush and the rules of the urinal flush.

Any restroom worth a damn has automatic flushes on its urinals. There's no acceptable reason at this point, with the motion technology we have, to make someone touch a urinal handle.

But if you enter a restroom straight out of the 1980s, flush before and after you go. This ensures no secondary urine splatter. Look. You don't want urine splatter ever. But you really don't fucking want secondary urine splatter.

Also, any decent urinal has a urinal cake. It's a jerk move to break it up with your piss stream. But everyone does it because it makes pissing more entertaining.

SINKS

Never use a sink that is not within easy reach of a drying station. It's incredible how poorly plotted so many public restrooms are, with a long row of sinks and two drying stations. This renders most of the sinks worthless.

You need at least three times as much public-restroom soap as regular hand soap. The worst by far are those soap dispensers that foam before you start rubbing it in. You can't tell at all how watered down that soap is. What you're looking for is something opaque, but that's very rare in the public-restroom soap game.

There's the issue of the faucets that may be the most divisive in the public restroom world. Do you want a faucet that is activated by motion, so you don't have to touch anything, or one that is activated by hot and cold handles so that you can get the water just right and ensure it doesn't stop on you. I'm in favor of the touch-free censors, but the water needs to come out at a decent temperature and pressure. I'll hear any side to this argument with great compassion because I think we're at a lose-lose on this battle. It's the final frontier for elite-level restroom improvement.

Also, if you're going to do anything other than wash your hands in the sink area, move aside for people just trying to handle their business. That means brushing your teeth and fixing your hair and applying chap stick fall under low-priority sink usage.

DRYING STATIONS AND EXITS

This is where the public-restroom greats truly stand out. The Joe Montana of public bathrooms offers numerous quilted paper towel dispensers that don't require any lever use as well as the Dyson Airblade. Don't know what a Dyson Airblade is? This is what a Dyson Airblade is:



There are plenty of exceptional high-powered hand dryers out these days, though. Having one of those ones that basically works like a car heater with the fan on full blast is not acceptable these days. You might as well just go with the paper towels because all of your restroom-goers will.

The paper towels seem to be vanishing from our nation's public restrooms, which is disturbing. I understand the environmental and cost issues of constantly stocking paper towels. I see people abusing them all the time. But if you get a decent quality of paper towel with a dispenser that makes it easy to grab just one and you couple it with a high-quality hand dryer, you're doing everyone who uses your bathroom a service. Not everyone washes their hands when they use the bathroom, and most people don't use the proper amount of soap. I want that paper towel to turn off the sink and to open the door. And I might want to splash some water on my face, in which case I'd like to be able to dry my face without sticking it under a jet dryer.

I included drying stations and exits together because they are inexorably linked. Let's start with the obvious: You should not have to twist a nob or pull a handle to get out. That forces touching something with your just-washed hands, and even forces prolonged contact. One balm for this also is pretty obvious: Between the drying station and the exit, preferably very close to the exit, should be a trash can. This way, you can use a paper towel on the door handle, which often is as germ-ridden as the toilet seat.

The exception is those big public restrooms that don't have doors. In fact, there is one scenario in which I will not complain about a lack of paper towels: a restroom with motion-sensitive faucets, a high-caliber hand dryer and no door.

Now that's a public restroom I can appreciate.

 

Vers, not trying to be critical, but do you have OCD? (I have a mild case of it, and I blame my ex for giving it to me.)

Nice write up. Agree with most of this. Have you used one of the super powerful hand dryers? I think the brand name is Xcelerator. Blows hot and fast and your hands are completely dry in 10 to 15 seconds. It makes your skin kind of move around wherever the jet stream is hitting. Only downside is its noisy, but it works and works fast, unlike all the other crap hand dryers that have been around the past 75 years.

 

Everyone has used the Xcelerator. This ain't my first rodeo.

 

Good use of "asteroid".

 

I hate these dispensors:

 

There's a button on most motion-sensitive toilets and urinals to auto-flush.

Also, it's called the men's room. Grow a pair and sink some battleshits.

 

Well done, Vers. If you can't discuss public bathrooms on SportsJournalists.com, where can you?

One thing you left out about towels ... still a few of these lurking out there:



I'm not grossed out by much in public bathrooms, but I was always leery of these.